Ayn Rand Quotes

Guilt only dreads Liberty of Speech, which drags it out of its lurking Holes, and exposes its Deformity and Horror to Day-light.

Then I proceeded to Williamsburg, where I found all well. I went to the capitol where I sent for the wench to clean my room and when I came I kissed her and felt her, for which God forgive me.... About 10 o’clock I went to my lodgings. I had good health but wicked thoughts, God forgive me.

Shame is the dying embers of virtue.

This isn't a mob, won't need to change the names. Everyone around you has murdered someone, something sacred. There isn't one nail without dirt under it. There isn't any white cotton panties that aren't soaked and stained red. It's better to push something when it's slipping, than to risk being dragged down.

Guilt has always its horrors and solicitudes; and, to make it yet more shameful and detestable, it is doomed often to stand in awe of those to whom nothing could give influence or weight but their power of betraying.

To have lied is to have suffered.

You are out of the way of temptation and out of the way of the tempter - I didn't mean to make you wicked - but I was - and am - and shall be - and I was with you so much that I couldn't help contaminate.

As Angelo discovered in Measure for Measure, nothing corrupts like virtue.

A man is sorry to be honest for nothing.

Nixon was the most dishonest individual I have ever met in my life. He lied to his wife, his family, his friends, his colleagues in the Congress, lifetime members of his own political party, the American people and the world.

What is guilt? Guilt is the pledge drive constantly hammering in our heads that keeps us from fully enjoying the show. Guilt is the reason they put the articles in Playboy.

For the most part fraud in the end secures for its companions repentance and shame.

When I wrote 'We Were The Mulvaneys,' I was just old enough to look back upon my own family life and the lies of certain individuals close to me, with the detachment of time. I wanted to tell the truth about secrets: How much pain they give, yet how much relief, even happiness we may feel when at last the motive for secrecy has passed.

Remorse: beholding heaven and feeling hell.

Guilt is a weird thing to me. I don't have a lot of it.

Remorse is the pain of sin.

How blunt are all the arrows of thy quiver in comparison with those of guilt.

I lied for years and years. And the thing about lies and secrets is that they eat you alive from the inside. I would not wish that pain on anyone.

I do all the evil I can before I learn to shun it? Is it not enough to know the evil to shun it? If not, we should be sincere enough to admit that we love evil too well to give it up.

… they seem to be such as would not swear, whore, nor be drunk, but they would lie, cozen and deceive.

Sitting in marble corridors waiting for important people to lie to you.

They lied, they cheated, they stole, they had the power to do it and they did.

Not one of us has betrayed his God or his country. I do confess my guilt, which consists in having, to my shame and dishonor, suffered myself, through the pain of torture and the fear of death, to give utterance to falsehoods imputing scandalous sins and iniquities to an illustrious Order, which hath nobly served the cause of Christianity. I disdain to seek a wretched and disgraceful existence by engrafting another lie upon the original falsehood.

I was tormented with guilt for years and years. In fact, it was so bad that if I didn't feel wrong, I didn't feel right!

I was forced to lie to my father by doctors and relatives. I made that choice and agreed with them, and I will never, ever get over it. If I hear a lie in my life with my children, with my wife, my work, my audiences, I want to annihilate myself, vaporize myself, and wipe myself off the face of the earth.